TCM’s ‘Story of Film’ Reaches the Heights of ‘Citizen Kane’ and Draws a Few Wild Cards

TCM's 'Story of Film,' Week 5

As it moves into what’s often though
of as the Hollywood studio system’s peak decade, Turner Classic Movies’ series ‘The Story of Film’ — built around the fifth part of Mark Cousins’ fifteen-hour documentary – is on well-trod ground. (The accompanying book,
Cousins announced on Twitter this morning, will be available in the U.S. on Nov. 15.) If you haven’t seen Citizen Kane or Singin’ in the Rain — well, what are you doing reading this? Get to
it!

But Cousins, as is his uptalking wont,
puts the often-examined films together in new ways, and TCM’s second night of
programming throws the brilliantly inventive Gun Crazy and the wonderfully strange A Matter of Life and Death (aka Stairway
to Heaven) into the mix to keep things interesting. Here, as every week, is
Criticwire’s annotated guide to TCM’s schedule. (Previous weeks are here).

Monday, Sept. 30

8 p.m.: Stagecoach (1939) (U.S.A.)

Not the first, or even John Ford’s first, Western, but a film
that (re)defined the genre, and brought to the fore a little-known actor named
John Wayne. The Directors Guild of America’s 1971 oral history includes memories from Ford, Wayne, cowboy regular Andy Devine, actress Claire
Trevor and legendary stuntman Yakima Canutt, who recalls hiring a farmer to
plough the dirt for the film’s climactic chase so his performers would have
something soft to land on. On the Criterion Collection’s site, David Cairnswrites how Ford acted as “ethnographer of an unreal world,” and in the Los Angeles
Times, I wrote about how the film looks forward with some melancholy to the end of the Wild West.

Books have been written and empires built on Orson Welles’ (nearly) undisputed masterpiece, whose name has become shorthand for the
heights of artistic achievement. Time magazine complied “the Citizen Kane of Citizen Kane Lists” and the Kids in the Hall riffed on its iconic status.

Rather than bow beneath the weight of accumulated scholarship,
let’s leave the description to Welles himself: “I wished to make a motion
picture which was not a narrative of action so much as an examination of
character…. There have been many motion pictures and novels rigorously obeying
the formula of the ‘success story,’ I wished to do something quite
different. I wished to make a picture which might be called a “failure
story.'”

1:30 a.m.: The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) (U.S.A.)

In 1946, director William Wyler explained to the New York Times that “Great
pictures can’t be entirely fictitious.” The story of three World War II
veterans returning home after the war is the least Hollywood of Hollywood
movies, costarring double-amputee veteran Harold J. Russell alongside Dana
Andrews and Frederic March. A pointed pairing with…

4:30 a.m.: Rome, Open City (1946) (Italy)

This 1977 article from the journal Jump Cut argues the radicalism of Roberto Rossellini’s
realist style.